Planning a "Blended" curriculum: Give students wings!

You all know how much I love technology in the classroom, not because it is a gimmick but because it genuinely spices up my teaching, saves me lots of time and most importantly, it is a great tool to practise key structures, in many different ways, which equals to lots of retrieval practice and stickability, in all the stages of the learning journey. Finally, it allows me to take languages outside the classroom and make my lessons accessible to my students once they leave the classroom, in other words, it can give students Super Powers or like the old Red Bull advert says, it gives my students wings!

However, for Digital tools to have a positive impact in our students' learning,  it is important to plan and make its use clear in the curriculum. In order to do that, as I mentioned in my previous blogpost on achieving Fluency, it is important to decide a platform to share with students and think backwards: What do we want our students to achieve by the end of each unit? How are we going to get there? and finally, which tools can we use at each stage of the process? 

This is the journey:

a these are some of the tools I use at each stage:

MODELLING STAGE

Spiral and Mentimeter

I use both tools as an alternative to Mini Whiteboards in the classroom: I do translations both ways, dictations, delayed dictation, finishing the sentence or write a sentence with the given word (great for retrieval practice). A tutorial video on how to use Spiral can be found here 

Screencasting 

Screencasting, I use Loom, your modelling activities, and upload them into your own very Youtube channel, is a great way to practise Modelling. Of course, I do modelling in face to face lessons with my students, however, I love the possibility of using my own Youtube videos as listenings, dictations and translation as homework tasks. This is a clear example of how technology allows you take your lesson outside the classroom! Modelling and listening/practise pronunciation has never been easier! This is an example video 

Bitmojis

Bitmojis are a great way to carry out modelling activities! I can make my Bitmoji talk and create multiple listening comprehension activities based on this: Fill in the gaps, Questions/Answer, full transcriptions etc.. I use PhotoSpeak on my iPhone to create the talking effect. Once the video is created and uploaded unto my Youtube channel, I can create a MS Forms task with it, add it to a LearningApps activity or just embed it into my OneNote with the activities I want my students to carry out. I love creating my own Speaking Bitmoji as a listening activity as I can speak faster, slower etc.. to meet the needs of my students.

For a post on how to use Bitmojis creatively in the classroom, visit this Blogpost.  with a tutorial from the amazing Joe Dale.  This is an example of my Bitmoji Speaking on Relationships for my Y10 class.

SentenceBuillders.com 

Ths site is amazing for Modelling!!! It was created by the talented Marting Lapworth, creator of TaskMagic and Textivate and it is based on Gianfranco Conti's MARS EARS type of activities with Sentence Builders. You can create your own activities or use the premium ones based on prepopulated Sentence Builders on the site. I use the site for face to face teaching with my students, but especially to help pupils memorise our Sentence Builders in a engaging way. For more information on this site, visit its Blog

AWARENESS-RISING AND CONTROLLED PRACTICE

Flippity

I love Flippity for fun drilling practice of my Sentence Builders with elements of Fluency as I demonstrate on this video tutorial  

I also use Flippity with Manipulatives and as a listening activity, you can even insert your Bitmoji video there too! Check out this example. Overall, it is a great way to have a Blended Learning experience!

LearningApps

One of my absolutely favourites! This tool will allow you to create many different type of online activities which will help students memorise those important Sentence Builders and practise the language in a controlled and fun way! Here there's a tutorial video on how to exploit this free tool in the classroom. 

All my LearningApps activities can be found here

Wheel of Names

Another of my classic activities for Blended Learning. I explain how I exploit and milk this tool in this Video Tutorial. 

Quizlet, Memrise, Blooket and Carousel Learning.

These vocab learning platforms are great tools to practise the language and help students memorise Sentence Builders. I use Memrise with KS3 and Quizlet with KS4. I always link each of my Sentence Builders to at least 3 Quizlet or Memrise courses with around 10 chunks in them. Carousel Learning is also a great way to practise translations and carry out Retrieval Practice. I love Blooket as it allows me to upload my Quizlet courses so, from one activity a get two interactive tasks!

Quizizz

A quiz tool which I maximise by asking students to produce long answers to oral questions before we carry out oral practice in class. A type of warming up task! I also use it as an alternative tool for listening practice. I explain how in this video Tutorial. 

SPONTANEITY/ROUTANISATION/AUTONOMY STAGE

Genially

Great for Escape Rooms and especially, BoardGames to practise open ended questions or specific structures. 

Tip: Plan in advance with your team how you can exploit Genially and divide the work by deciding, within your team, who could create which activities on different topics. I also love using Genially to practise Exam skills in a relaxed way, even with ALevels! An example can be found here. 

Deck Toys

Deck toys is the not so known app and it is fantastic!  I use it to create Scape Rooms with all levels, including Y13/Y11 and exam skills. I love it, because I can also include Quizlet courses here. For a blogpost on how to exploit Deck Toys use in the classroom, click here. 

All my DeckToys activities can be found here. 

Flipgrid

Great for oral presentations! I love this app as students can cover their face or even do screencasting. I also like the fact that I can enter some rubrics to mark their work. 

Padlet

Another classic! I use it for collaborative work but also to showcase what students can write about from memory at the end of the learning journey, so the whole class can see each other's entries and learn from each other. I also use Padlet as a revision guide at GCSE. A post on how to do that can be found here. 

Of course there are more tools!  This is just a summary of my favourite mainly FREE ones! This is language, The Language Gym, Textivate and Languagenut are also some of my favourite ones at the Practice Stage too. 

The key point is to plan, when designing the curriculum, how and where these tools could be used in the classroom to give students WINGS!

A presentation on these ideas, which I carried out for Languagenut can be found here 

From Structured Production to Fluency

I have decided to write a short post on the trickiest and most difficult stage of the language learning journey: the transition from structured production, where students practise the structures and chunks in our Sentence Builders, to spontaneous output, where the students can produce such structures freely and, most importantly, creatively by manipulating the chunks and applying grammatical rules.

What is fluency?

Before I show my strategy, I would like to define what fluency means for me in the context of a secondary school setting, with limited curriculum time and pressures from external exams.

Fluency does not mean to be able to speak freely on any topic, as a nearly bilingual person would do. That’s another interpretation of fluency, which, hopefully we can reach at some point, normally towards the end of Year 13 and in some cases by the end of Y11.

In my context, fluency means that my students can reproduce in speaking or writing format, unaided, from memory, the structures we have practised on a given topic and in the case of intermediate learners, to start combining Sentence Builders from past topics and applying grammar freely to express their own opinions and saying what they want! In this sense, my Year 7s can be fluent when talking/writing about Free Time for example, which is hugely motivating. 

Students start creating schemata in their long term memory with the studied Sentence Builders on different topics, creating a web of fluencies/schemata which relate to each other, allowing them to manipulate language and combine key structures and vocabulary, such as suelo, me gusta, me gustaría que… fuera/ si tuviera la oportunidad, etc… and apply grammatical rules, in new contexts, becoming creative with the language, to reach, little by little, the more general definition of fluency, which for me would mean the true internalisation of the grammatical system and a big corpora of vocabulary/structures, which can be reproduced by the brain, automatically, to create utterances and which, as I said, in my experience, starts occurring by the end of Y11 or Y13, if not later!

It is liberating then, to say to my Y7 you are fluent in Spanish on this topic and as you become fluent with other topics too and start applying the grammar and combining structures more freely, you will become a truly fluent speaker of Spanish in any given topic. But your first step is there!

How to achieve fluency?

In my experience, it is essential to have a clear SoW and learning path for students. That's why I always advise teachers to plan backwards. Start by deciding as a team, what outcome/ model text you would like your students to be able to produce by the end of a topic or unit, making sure that you incorporate structures and grammar from past topics/sentence builders, retrieving key structures in new contexts. 

Once that is decided, design the Sentence Builders based on the vocabulary/grammar needed for your students to reach your final outcome; and reflect on the activities you, as a department, are going to use to help your students at each stage of their learning journey within a topic, from Modelling, going through Structured Production to reach Spontaneity/Creativity.  Having a list of these activities in a given SoW can be extremely useful for a team, see the second picture below. 

Do not expect Fluency/Spontaneity/Creativity to happen spontaneously without careful planning and a clear  structure. Spontaneity or the EARS part of the learning journey, using Gianfranco Conti's nomenclature, needs to be planned and structured and it relies on a robust implementation of the two previous stages of learning (MARS). Move too fast, and the last stage will not happen! hence, why it is so difficult to achieve in a secondary school setting, although not impossible!

Strategies to achieve fluency

Have a “less is more” approach, specially at KS3, so that you avoid cognitive overload. Start increasing the amount of topics/grammar to cover in a given year, as students become more mature. In our case, we teach 3 topics in Y7, 4 in Y8 and 4/5 (as we study a film as a topic) in Y9. You can see this in my KS3 SoW, which you can find here. 

Retrieval Practice and Recycling of key structures, called Universals by Gianfranco Conti, or high impact expressions by me, is key. This requires careful planning of the SoW, and the material to include in your Sentence Builders. These should incorporate content vocabulary but also a list of key structures and high frequency words, recycled in different Sentence Builders, so when given a new Sentence Builder, around 20 or 30% of the structures are already known to students. They will feel motivated too.  When deciding your activities, for the Modelling and Structured Production stages, make sure you  incorporate vocabulary from previous topics. Retrieve past topics and LEARNED STRUCTURES, CONSTANTLY. it is what I call EMBEDDED RETRIEVAL PRACTICE. A blog post on this can be found here.

Case example:

My Y10 students studied problems/accidents during the topic of holidays and they learned the structure "un dia iba a/quería + infinitive" (salir con mis amigos, ir a la playa, which allowed them to recycle vocabulary from Free Time anyway) "cuando de repente, me picó una medusa/ tuve un accidente con el móvil/ me caí al suelo/a la piscina etc...".  Students learned these structures extremely well via Structured Production activities and could produce them spontaneously when we did the topic. I thought that was a nice way to incorporate a story, which could be funny so memorable, as Vincent Everett explains in his blog, to their GCSE repertoire. Consequently, in subsequent topics, we always incorporated a problem or an accident that happened to them when in school, when working at the weekend, when they met their best friend. Every time we revisit this subtopic, I incorporate new key structures to the problem, "le dije" "me dijo" " ese dia estaba contento porque había ganado una competición de música". All my students now, can narrate, fluently, a little accident/problem in many different contexts using key vocabulary, thanks to constant revisiting of the stuctures!

Recycle of all the activities you used in the Structured Production stage but with a twist. In the previous learning stage, I tend to use many translation type of activities, either by using Battleships, Information Gap activities, Oral Ping-Pong and especially LOTS of classic BOARD GAMES, which at the moment I do via Genially Templates and those produce by the talented Marie Allirot. A link to Marie's Boardgames as she showed in the ALLLondon Show & Tell in June can be found here. 

I use these templates all the time!  However, at this final stage, instead of expecting students to translate a sentence, the boardgames tasks will require students to create utterances from a given word, for example, or answer open ended questions on a given topi, always incorporating questions from past topics too, which force students to retrieve language/structures from their long term Memory. 

Flippity and Wheel of Names are also brilliant ways to develop fluency in this way! firstly in writing via mini white boards and then in pairs by testing each other. I explain how I do this in these two youtube Videos of mine:

How to maximise Wheel of Names (via Blended Learning) for Spontaneous Production. In this video example, I use translations but for spontaneity, I would use open ended questions or the beginning of a sentence they have to finish, or a topic students need to write or speak about, for a given time. Video link here

How to maxime the the use of Flippity (via Blended Learning) for Spontaneous Production. Video link here 

Other activities that work for Spontaneous Practice:

Oral presentations via Flipgrid. This can be very powerful if students feel confident about the language and the structures they need to use. 

Use of Padlet, where students write from memory what they remember from a particular topic. See example below from my Y9 students.  I also find that trying spontaneous production in writing before doing it orally, helps a lot!

3,2,1. Speak on a topic for 3 minutes, then change partner and do it for 2 minutes then for 1 minute!  This activity works extremely well combined with Speed Dating! 

Any Dice game linked to a topic: have six topics on the board numbered, if you get a 1 you must talk about that topic for a set period of time.  I love Vincent Everett's idea, where students work in pairs and scribble in a piece of paper while their partner speaks and stop when their partner stops talking.  The person who managed to speak the longest, more scribbling in the sheet, is the winner! This is his blogpost where he explains this activity. I tried this a couple of weeks ago and it worked brilliantly!  All students wanted to speak for long. 

Group talk like Greg Horton beautifully explained in the ALL June conference last week.  Get students to work in groups of 3/4. Set some questions on the board, mainly opinions on topics, and students must have a conversation, agreeing and disagreeing with each other on the given topics. This works really well if, previously "small talk" phrases have been taught to students such as: estoy de acuerdo, pero estás loco! , se te va la olla, de ninguna de las manera, pues para decir verdad, yo diría que, ¿de verdad?, tienes razon, no tenía ni idea! 

Piedra, Papel, Tijera (Stone, paper, scissors) where the winner needs to answer a question or talk on a topic. This can be combined to 1,2,3 or the Scribble Vincent's idea. 

Use of Flippity: the Randomizer in pairs. I am going to use this next week with my Y10s in preparation for their oral exam: students click on the randomizer and must answer the given question from column one, using the structure, some how, from column 2. Example here. 

Finally! Practising questions!!! if we want students to be fluent, they will need to ask questions. This can be done, easily, with Flippity and the Randomizer using question words that students need to create to find out things about the life of the teacher, for example.

Fluency is not easy, but if it is planned effectively it can take place as early as Y7!!!

Curriculum design at KS4: Closing the gap!

A few weeks ago I wrote about curriculum design at KS3 using a lexicogrammar approach underpinning the concept that less is more! Click here to read that post. However, can the same approach be adopted at KS4 taking into account the constrictions of the GCSE exam?

Two years ago, I started teaching the GCSE Spanish course using the MARS EARS approach adopted at KS3 and it worked! Sadly we did not have public exams this year, to show data in relation to its success, but students' progress, their feedback and attitude towards MFL are important testimonials.

I started teaching the approach with a low ability Y10 class in September 2019. After finishing the GCSE course a few weeks ago, 2 students from this set have chosen to study Spanish for A Level and about 50% of the class are working at a 6-8 level. Nobody is falling below the important 4 grade mark. For me that is success! Currently, I am teaching a new Y10 class, this time a top set, using the same lexicogrammar approach. The feedback and progress are equally positive.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the approach works because the approach breaks out the language into affordable chunks which are easier to encode into the long-term memory and gives specific structure to low ability students. Similarly, high flyers can become fluent quickly, which increases motivation, and start manipulating the language freely.

Key elements of the KS4 MARS EARS Curriculum

• In order to continue progress from Y9, we use Sentence Builders for all the AQA GCSE topics.

• We adopt the same MARS EARS approach to teaching as in KS3, although, giving time constraints, the time spent at each stage (modelling, awareness raising, receptive processing etc..) has to be reduced. This is not a problem, as students have a very solid foundation on key structures and grammatical knowledge from Y9. Consequently, although I would welcome more curriculum time, I can deliver the syllabus allowing the recycling of lots of structures. 

• Each Sentence Builder is linked to a Quizlet course, which helps memorisation. Students have weekly "sentence" spelling tests combining the content of such SB.

• The same "high impact expressions" which were extensively taught and recycled at KS3, are used and recycled at KS4, closing the learning circle for students. These high impact expressions, inevitably have to increase in number but at least 50% of them are familiar to students as they have been used since Y7!: se me da bien/ me ayuda a relajarme/siempre he querido hacerlo/ me gustaría que... fuera/tuviera are examples of these structures.

• Students are encouraged to manipulate language more and more and moving away from the Sentence Builders (the EARS part of the approach). Progressive timed writings are key to achieve this. We plan a timed writing every two weeks in exam conditions, after extensively modelling and structured practice, since the beginning of Y11. These timed writings are also essential for interleaving topics and subtopics.

• We recognise that there are two types of vocabulary: productive (that appearing in our Sentence Builders) which students know in all its forms (semantic, morphological, phonological and grammatical meaning) and receptive (the official AQA vocabulary), which appears in Listening and Reading exam questions, and which students also learn in Quizlets. However, students only require to recognise the receptive vocabulary. High ability students transfer, naturally, receptive vocabulary into productive one, which is pleasing to see.

• The strategic planning of Reading and Listening exam style questions via Exampro tasks, which we extensively analyse in lessons.

• Encouragement to use TL where possible. A tight reward system is applied to achieve this. Scratch cards are a winner here!

• The strategic planning of Structured Production leading to Fluency via a wide range of engaging and communicative tasks. Those activities used at KS3 can easily be adapted to KS4, which means we do not need a textbook!

• Lots of grammar practice and encouraging metalanguage to identify patterns in Sentence Builders, so when explicitly explained, grammar encodes successfully into the long-term memory. It is magical to see how low ability students can spot the differences between present, past and future and guess whole verb paradigms based on their present tense conjugation experience: "we" in Spanish will always have a "m", while "they" will have a "n".

• Incorporating cultural aspects to the curriculum via songs, poems and short films (Cuerda o La leyenda del espantapájaros work brilliantly here).

• Teaching students, via a Sentence Builder which can be recycled in many topics, to narrate a funny story/little disaster. I got this idea from Vincent Everett and it really adds elements of complexity: reported speech for example, which translates into grades. In this scenario, students learn: entonces mi amigo dijo/ iba a ... pero decidí/ iba a cuando de repente. Students also enjoy creating these stories.

• Sharing marking schemes with students, referring to these and actively asking students to reflect and act upon specific feedback: Closing the gaps and making students take ownership for their learning. This includes the use of post exam/ assessment reflection sheets. In the example below, students spend a lesson reflecting on their performance overall (in same cases we do not assess all the skills). They colour in the circles to reflect, visuall,y where they are in relation to their Baseline Grade (BG). Green above BG, yellow meeting their target, pink below target. Then, they decide, with my guidance, what strategies they will adopt to close the gaps. In the following assessments they review this sheet and they will fill in a new one. There are always some wins, which increases confidence.  Similarly, this is great to help students see which level they are working at and have a clear progress road map to sucess!

Example of my KS4 Post Exam Reflection sheet here

• Interleaving topics! Carousel Learning is great for this!

• Balance between exam skills and learning for pleasure, the JUST RIGHT GOLDILOCKS effect.

• Pitching at the right level and encouraging a growth mindset: making mistakes is fine as we learn from them. Get students involved in their own learning. 

Find my KS4 SoW here

Find all my GCSE AQA Spanish Sentence Builders here